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Craft beer maker implements automated bottle packing

Fort Collins Brewery saves time, labor, and worker tedium, while increasing production capacity to better serve growing markets.

NO SUBSTITUTE. FCB co-owner Tom Peters says, “When your business begins to grow, there is no substitute for well-engineered automation.”
NO SUBSTITUTE. FCB co-owner Tom Peters says, “When your business begins to grow, there is no substitute for well-engineered automation.”

The Fort Collins Brewery, Fort Collins, CO, produces a full line of hand-crafted beers, including several full-time, year-round brews plus unique specialty and seasonal beers. To sustain growth, the company has continually and conscientiously re-evaluated and upgraded processing and packaging operations at its 30,000-square-feet facility to ensure the highest product quality, consistency, and production efficiencies.

The amber bottles, in 12- and 22-oz- volume sizes, are delivered to FCB in bulk quantities by Owens-Illinois. Body and neck labels are applied at the brewery, using cold glue label application equipment from PE Labeling.

FCB co-owner Tom Peters notes, “We use 42# wet-strength paper labels supplied by DWS of Deerpark, NY. Currently, our labels are 4-color, but we are switching to DWS’ new 7-color process because it will provide our labels with brighter colors and sharper images to really stand out on the retail shelves. Our 4-color-printed bottle carriers, made of wet-strength paperboard, are supplied by Wynalda Litho. And our corrugated shipping cases are from RockTenn. For our full-time beers, we have individual cases with the brand image pre-printed on all four sides. The shipping case graphics are two-color process printed over white surface board.”

FCB uses a Sympak tri-block rinser/filler/capper acquired from CFT Packaging. Peters says, “This machine, originally installed at our previous location in 2005, runs at 115 bottles per minute and has integrated very well at our new location. It features bottle rinse stations, a 16-head double pre-evacuation filler, and a 3-head crowner.”

But in 2013, FCB expanded its brewing capacity with a 50 Bbl. Rolec automated brew house and clean-in-place system and upgraded beer filtering and carbonating systems. In conjunction with its new processing/packaging equipment installations, the brewery also wanted to increase capacity and efficiency of its bottle carrier and casing operations. For its multi-bottle carrier packs, FCB had been buying 6-pack paperboard carriers that brewery personnel would have to manually erect and manually load into shipping cases. Manually depositing the carrier packs into brand-specific shipping cases was very time-consuming and a mundane job.

Peters recalls, “This started to look like an episode of ‘I Love Lucy’ with the candy conveyor line. We were only doing 6-packs at that time. When we started to get into 4-packs, the crew didn’t have enough hands and fingers to keep up. We knew there had to be a better approach.”

Automating packing operations
After reviewing its carrier and casing options, FCB decided to implement “The Box Shop” solution (carrier erector, multi-packer, and case erector) from Pearson Packaging Systems. The Pearson BE60 carrier erector features compact, rugged design, and can erect 4-, 6-, and 8-pack bottle carriers. The small-footprint Pearson MP35 multi-packer, equipped with a PLC from Rockwell, is designed to automatically place/push bottle carriers into shipping cases. The compact Pearson CE25 Case Erector, capable of erecting RSCs (regular slotted cases) and bottom-sealing them with pressure-sensitive tape or hot-melt adhesive, also was custom-engineered for the FCB application and has a 2-ft magazine extension. Also, a 15-ft twin-lane carrier conveyor and an additional case conveyor were installed for the Pearson MP35 Multi-Packer.

INTRODUCING! The Latest Trends for Life Sciences at PACK EXPO Southeast
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INTRODUCING! The Latest Trends for Life Sciences at PACK EXPO Southeast